The Bicycling World, Vol 2, No 6
Articles in this issue
- Weekly editorial column by 'Rad.' opening with a humorous Providence horse-frightening incident and mock demand for anti-bicycle legislation, followed by squibs on ice-riding mishaps and holiday bicycle gifts from the Pope Manufacturing Co.
- Twelve-stanza satirical poem by F.W.B. posing wry questions about the bicycle cult — why riders endure falls, why Boston cyclists outshine the world, and why a grown man devotes his life to an iron wheel.
- The editor declines to name a single best machine, arguing that the Royal Challenge, Harvard, Special Columbia, Humber Roadster, and Stanley are closely matched and that beginners cannot judge subtle differences without extended trial.
- Satirical essay signed 'B.' cataloguing how every member of a Western bicycle club — doctor, hardware merchant, clergyman — prospered in health and business after taking up the wheel, while the anti-cycling alderman and Democratic editor suffered reversals.
- Correspondent 'Lubricator,' a middle-aged Boston rider, warns that Sunday club parades antagonize fifteen million American Sabbath-observers, urges wheelmen to promote the bicycle's practical daily utility, and calls for 50,000 machines in use within four years.
- Anonymous correspondent 'Madeline' describes watching Boston bicycle clubs from her Beacon Street window, praising the soldierly Mercury Club riders while criticizing an older club's non-uniform costumes, and noting that young women always pause to watch skilled cyclists.
- Correspondent 'Practical' warns against ice-riding after two falls on a frozen pond bent his bicycle's fork and handlebars; a companion also cut his forehead on the ice, and tricycle members fared little better.
- Brief reports: Boston Bi. C. corrects its uniform color (green, not gray); the new Lawrence Bicycle Club forms with thirteen members; Toledo wheelmen hold a preliminary organizing meeting; Peoria club members race on frozen lake ice.
- Long letter from the pseudonymous English correspondent 'Jack Easy' reflecting on the 1880 American tour, praising English road surfaces and club hospitality, and urging American wheelmen to build an organization matching the Bicycle Touring Club's 3,000 members.
- 'Knick O'Bocker' reports on the Mercury Club's first Harlem drill night, the Manhattan Bi. C.'s proposal for a cinder bicycle path in Central Park, J.S. Dean's championship medal ride, and inter-club social gossip for December 1880.
- Reprint from the Kankakee Gazette lamenting that country road-making in the United States is a lost art beside England's state-supervised roads, and explaining how bedding the big stones and covering with gravel yields a road-bed that defies rain and heavy teams.
- Short items: Henry S. Meyer opening a bicycle riding school in Williamsport, Pa.; Russian dealers ordering Columbia bicycles from Pope Manufacturing; Nashville Bi. C. mourning charter member Rutledge Whipple.
- Notes that the Spirit of the Times has offered a $250 prize to any skater who can beat the bicycle record over any distance from 1 to 1,000 miles, wondering whether amateur Mr. Pitman or the Harrisons and Rollinson will compete.
- Reprinted from the Philadelphia Press: H.M. Bentley, a 48-year-old 190-lb. businessman, recounts a 600-mile tour through upstate New York, Saratoga Springs, and Manhattan with Western Union superintendent James Merrihew and his twelve-year-old son.
- F. H. Walworth's archery notes on judging bows: a once-despised 48-pound beef-and-hickory bow carries him past 500 points on the York Round, he ranks the self-yew and yew-backed yew above all rivals, and he complains that barely four arrows in a dozen are true.
- Letter to the Editor of Archery Field from Highland Park replying to Mr. Whitman's earlier communication, with practical directions for making a bow from an eight-to-ten-inch ironwood (hornbeam) tree.
- Describes the weapon of the Klamath River Indians of California: a bow about three feet long and two inches wide at its broadest, tapering to half an inch at the ends and barely three-eighths of an inch thick.
- Archery gossip column: 'Long Bowman' deals gently with the New York Archery Club in Brentano's Monthly, the editor retorts to the Olympian's Brother Havens about 'ventilating notions,' and Mr. Brownell's improved score-book is praised.
- Reviews Mr. Burbank's Cycling Sketches — sketches, poems, a brief history of the League of American Wheelmen's formation, though too many illustrations of headers — and John Swinton's Travels, forty days in France and England from G. W. Carleton & Co.
- League of American Wheelmen department: corresponding secretary Albert S. Parsons publishes membership applications from the Worcester Bi. C. and unattached riders in Hamilton and Guelph, Ont., and a Boston Globe report reveals the engraver finishing the new L.A.W. badge die attempted suicide, delaying the badges.
- Letter to the Chicago Tribune (27 November) defending the bicycle's growing presence on Chicago streets, likening its critics to those who once denounced the railroad and martyred the first man to carry an umbrella on the king's highway.
- Humor department: a Glasgow member's 'necessity knows no L.A.W.' conundrum, an 'encore' verse of Yankee Land, a limerick on a slanderer from Augusta, and a proposal to popularize the wheelbarrow by renaming it the unicycle.
- Bob Burdette's report in the Hawkeye on Nantucket's fashionable roller-skating rink, crowded nightly with ladies and gentlemen, and his preference for enjoying the poetry of motion vicariously from the sidelines.